With 20 resorts in prime locations across the United States, Mexico and Canada, Ann Barker, Senior Vice President of Resort Operations says “with our more than 38,000 owners, we need to keep constant tabs on numerous items. Our GM’s love the detailed information that create a clear list of actionable items to maintain high standards.”

Barker says she especially appreciates the immediate alerts issued by the system with parameters she controls internally. “For instance, if a resort receives a three or below rating in any one of a number of areas, we are alerted immediately. This auto-generated notice allows us to nip any problems in the bud, without waiting for our monthly reports. Of course, the monthly reports are exceptionally important for performance measurement review scoring and customer satisfaction overall.”

Christi Riechert, Vice President of Member Affairs uses CustomerCount® to monitor the Call Center. “The transition to CustomerCount® was amazingly painless. We didn’t miss a beat converting from our previous vendor,” she said. “What was best was the amount of human expertise the system came with. They thought of things we hadn’t even considered. Coming from the timeshare industry themselves it was clear that they understood both our in-house needs as well as those of our Members.”

Mobius Vendor Partners is a thirteen year old business process design and management company specializing in servicing the needs of the timeshare industry. Mobius principals are active in ARDA through sponsorships and committee memberships. Follow their blogs at http://www.customercount.com/ or follow them on Twitter @CustomerCount or facebook.com/CustomerCount

For more information visit http://www.customercount.com or call 317-816-6000.

ABOUT RAINTREE RESORTS Founded in 1997, Raintree Resorts International has expanded to become the respected leader in luxury developments in popular vacation destinations throughout Mexico, the western United States and western Canada. Raintree Vacation Club, the exchange arm of Raintree Resorts is a unique blend of club, resort and hotel hospitality vacation options serving the company’s owners/Members at their 20 resorts.

Some colleagues and I were debating whether or not a periodic report from a vendor that provides an overview of the work completed on behalf of the hiring organization is sufficient enough to understand the customer interaction with an outside vendor. The consensus among this group was it would be wise to have two sets of information available: structured survey questions related to customers interacting with vendors and having a periodic report delivered by the vendor. Combining the two will allow decision-makers the ability to have more collaborating business intelligence related to the vendors’ interaction from a customer standpoint and that of the vendor. Using this method will also allow managers of vendor relationships to attach a score using its “enterprise customer feedback solution”:http://www.customercount.com so they make track the level of satisfaction of doing business with an extension of the brand. For instance, Vonage hired ACCENT Marketing Services to handle inbound calls for new activations and servicing existing clients with questions regarding their phone service. Vonage receives daily activity reports from ACCENT outlining a variety of Key Performance Indicators, but the data does not tell them how the customer felt about that interaction. This is a prime example of why you need to incorporate the vendor’s activities with your enterprise customer feedback solution so you can get the customers’ perspective. You might want to consider adding a question or two in your customer feedback survey asking about the interaction with the outsourced call agent to obtain your vendor score.

Scoring vendors using one’s enterprise customer feedback solution will help assist a decision-maker during their annual vendor reviews. This way, you do not have to rely on the vendors report for an entire picture of how they are servicing your customers. It was also brought up that vendors should be made aware they are being scored on a continuous basis in order to determine if they are meeting customer’s expectations in their deliverables. I could go either way on this one. I suppose if I had to choose between informing my vendor of the inclusion of survey questions directed at the activities they have with my customer or not, I would choose to inform them. The thought behind doing so is that I want my vendor to know I am evaluating them on a continuous basis. I do not have to wait for a predetermined time to conduct an evaluation of the vendor and hope that by keeping them continually accountable is the key to our business relationship being successful.

How do you know if there are issues with a particular area of your business unit if your survey provider doesn’t alert you? Internal users of customer intelligence are inundated with a massive amount of statistical information accumulated from customer feedback surveys so where do you begin? Hopefully, you can export that data into an excel document that would then allow you to highlight a cell containing a result below your minimum threshold. This could be very time consuming depending on the number of questions in your company survey that has a direct impact on your area. So, the question to ask yourself is what more can your survey provider do to help you narrow a search focusing on low scores. Does your survey program highlight scores that fall below your predetermined acceptable levels? You never know until you ask.

Obtaining company-wide support of a VOC program can be difficult challenge so why not involve more departments?

At the onset of developing questions for a company branded survey, the first objective is to determine what you want to get out of your customer feedback program. Is it to identify areas of improvement within the customer services call center or possibly understand if your customers are aware of additional product offerings? Other objectives could be to understand how your customer wants to receive future communications regarding account status, marketing information, or receiving a customer feedback invitation. Whatever your objectives may be, it would be wise to solicit decision-makers from multiple departments within your organization for their input on question development. The more departments you have participating in survey question development will increase the number of executives who will champion the VOC program internally and encourages usage of the customer intelligence gathered on a more regular basis.

Those who manage corporate VOCs program are often asked about the ROI of the program. If you have more departments contributing to the construction of survey questions, it would seem logical that the ROI will increase because you have more interested parties reviewing survey results periodically due to their previous input. more departments that become involved in your VOC program will translate into better cross communications amongst your departments and provide better insights into the overall picture of driving revenue for your firm. Instead of departments working in silos, they will begin working together as a cohesive unit. At the end of the day, you want all departments working together for a common goal….protect and increase market share.

Survey “thank you” pages do not receive enough attention in driving brand name recognition let alone position a marketing message directed to the consumer. The majority of thank you pages I see simply thank the customer for their time in a sentence or two and that is it. Why would you not take advantage of this opportunity to share with the customer future product development initiatives, an incentive for their time, or direct them to a particular page on your corporate website? The thank you page can give you a lot of flexibility in positioning your brand with additional offers, discounted or not, or suggest the customer join the ranks of those who follow and like you on Facebook or LinkedIn to name a couple. Finally, this page is a great venue for allowing the customer to opt-in for future communications which will make your Marketing department very happy.

A well designed thank you page can be a lead generator for the products and services you provide whether in a B2B or B2C environment. Display images to tell a story and incorporate those images with content providing a brief description of an added value feature you have. Then, provide a link to one of your web pages that will more eloquently describe the product and/or service. If you have a white paper that goes into detail about the features and benefits of an existing product or service, place a link on the thank you page to that white paper which probably resides on your website. I bet after the customer reads that white paper they will make a couple more clicks on your website per due diligence. Now you allow the organization’s website to enhance brand awareness and possibly drive future spend.